Darkest Hour: Europe ‘44 – ‘45
Publisher: Valve/Steam. Designer: Darkest Hour Team. A free add-on for Red Orchestra by Tripwire Interactive (available via Steam or retail for $19.99)

Passed Inspection: A realistic depiction of the mechanics of combat. Detailed weapons, right down to the Garand’s distinctive "ping." A very few incredibly atmospheric maps.

Failed Basic: Never quite captures the grandeur of Red Orchestra’s you-are-there conflicts. Many battles are one-sided affairs or otherwise poorly designed.

While Red Orchestra covers action on the Eastern Front between German and Soviet forces, Darkest Hour returns to what is likely more familiar territory for gamers, the Western Front.

Red Orchestra. Anyone looking for a multiplayer first person shooter that captures the brutality and uncertainty of war will find no better title than this. Running across the sights of a machine gun hundreds of meters away and being cut down without firing a shot, being run over by a friendly tank as you hide praying in the grass – ignominious death is a commodity that’s on a fire sale. Balancing this is an intense attention to realism that crafts excitement and immersion from the pervasive confusion of combat: Bolt-action rifles are accurate but slow, so each shot has to count; house-to-house battles are terrible affairs that often end at bayonet point, and the survivor is likely the player who took care to stay silent; careful movement is the key to not getting yourself shot, and getting shot means being dead. The action takes place online, pitting all comers against skilled players from around the world, and the game has created a multiplayer community that rivals those of its big-budget competitors such as Call of Duty.

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Enter, then, the first official release of an add-on for Red Orchestra’s engine: Darkest Hour. While Red Orchestra covers action on the Eastern Front between German and Soviet forces, Darkest Hour returns to what is likely more familiar territory for gamers, the Western Front. American dogfaces and British tommies land at Normandy and open up the road to the Rhine through a series of brutal small engagements that strike a much different note from the larger but little-known affairs portrayed by Red Orchestra. Unfortunately, this works against the game, which we’ll discuss in a moment.

In Darkest Hour players take control of a single soldier fighting in a variety of standalone encounters across Northern Europe. At the start of each battle players select the role they’d like to play, as defined by a fairly well-designed set of classes. These classes range from simple (rifleman) to fiendishly complex and hard-hitting (commander or tank crewman). Often, the more powerful classes have hard limits on the number of players that can choose them – for instance, there is usually only one commander per side. There are challenges inherent in each role, however, and players looking for a good time can have just as much fun playing as a rifleman as they can at driving a tank.

Available battles run the gamut from early engagements by Allied paratroopers to desperate scuffles in the confusion of the Ardennes. Curiously absent, though, are the massive set-piece struggles and attention to detail that made Red Orchestra so occasionally breathtaking.

The feeling of taking part in a larger conflagration is a key to many Red Orchestra battles, and here the action is noticeably smaller-scale, taking place in tiny villages or isolated sections of forest. While this should in theory make for more intensity, one quickly discovers that the missing atmosphere is tantamount to unrealism: it hardly matters whether your weapon has the same manufacturer’s stamp as its historical counterpart when you don’t actually feel that you’re fighting in a battle that has larger meaning.

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